Memories tattooed in my mind
On each side of my body, below the waistband, are my tattoos.
They are not pretty and they don’t say anything — just two dark blue dots. I pay them no mind.
I got them all those years ago on the first day of radiation for cancer. The young woman poked me with the needle to make marks by which the beams would line up for every treatment.
Technically, I have tattoos, but not really. My lack of decorative inking puts me in line with women my age, who have low rates of tattooing. But put me in a younger age group and I would be an outlier.
All the young people have tatts — ok, not all, but more than half of all women 18 to 29 have them, with most of them having more than one. According to the Pew Research Group, about 32% of all Americans are tatted, and the number is growing.
If I were younger, would I get inked? Without living in the context of someone that age, I couldn’t know. But standing on this side of Gen X, I admit I don’t get the appeal.
It’s not that I think tattoos are ugly or wrong, nor do I adhere to the now-tired observation that with time the images will spread and morph into unsightly Rorschach blots. People who get inked do so for personal reasons, and they select images that will likely always be meaningful; time and wrinkles won’t change that. But I wonder if all the inking might be a flesh manifestation of our snapshot culture.
Before smartphones brought instant photography, we snapped a photo using a film camera and then waited for the prints to come back. When my children were very young my hobby was snapping photos of them, sending the rolls off to Kodak in those mailer envelopes that came in the Sunday paper, and then running to the mailbox to see if the prints had arrived. I’d open to find maybe two good shots from the roll of 24. I’d failed to capture the rest of the moments.
But they were in my mind.
Maybe all this instant photography has supplanted memory. Some of my most touching, joyous, frightening and sad moments happened without benefit of a lens. My daughter’s excellent giraffe while playing animal charades on the front porch are not on my camera reel or in an album, but I will always have it in my memory. And last Valentine’s Day when my son called to tell me, “You were my first sweetheart,” I thought about writing that down somewhere, but why? I knew I’d never forget those five words.
I wonder if our universal human need to imprint and retain significant moments and events can explain the desire for tattoos. Hollywood stars ink the dates and geographical coordinates of their children’s births on their bodies. As a reminder? As a permanent snapshot of a moment? A common tattoo theme is the name and even a drawing of a deceased loved one. It’s an homage, but mostly a way to spark a memory that lives in a place beyond a camera reel snapshot, or some ink on a forearm.
My daughter once asked if I’d ever get a tattoo, something meaningful or pretty.
“No,” I said, tapping my temple. “I don’t need it. It’s all here.”